Let us face it: Attorneys face a relatively tight market and an overwhelmingly negative public perception of their profession. This makes it hard to run successful marketing campaigns and generate enough lawyer leads for their firms.
But that doesn’t mean all is lost. With the right strategies and investment, you can still run successful lead generation campaigns that will ensure you have a steady supply of high-paying clients throughout the year.
The most important thing is to appreciate today’s digitally connected world and strive to be where your potential clients are in the moments that matter.
Keep in mind that when your potential customers want legal services, most of them haven’t decided which attorney to work with, which services they need, and even how much they wish to spend on hiring an attorney.
You need to be there to provide this information and convince them to hire you as their attorney. However, that may not be as simple as it sounds.
That is why we have created this guide to help you understand some of the things you need to do to overcome digital marketing challenges within your law firm. Read on to learn more.
Understanding Some of the Common Digital Marketing Challenges that Law Firms Face
Besides protecting your client’s interests and doing everything possible to win their cases, you need to keep in mind that your law firm is a business. Therefore, it is crucial to think beyond the courtroom and find ways of growing and managing it efficiently.
To do this, you require a steady flow of lawyer leads that can convert into clients. You also need to do everything possible to maintain your current list of clients.
Modern lawyers need to be constantly in tune and understand their target market. Unfortunately, technology has changed consumers and the way they shop for products and services.
The modern consumer has quick access to information and so many options. Therefore, it takes more than conventional ways to engage this consumer and sell your legal services to them.
To do so, you need to change your strategy in ways that serve both your existing and potential clients better. The modern consumer no longer uses the traditional awareness path when hiring an attorney.
It means that they won’t come to you first. They will most likely fail to call you even after seeing your Yellow Pages listing or TV advert.
With a lot of information at their disposal, consumers combine traditional and digital methods to find optimal solutions to their problems. They will spend a lot of time researching online before they decide to talk to an attorney.
The modern consumer also tends to trust online opinions and reviews about law firms and lawyers. Most of them go online to read about other people’s experiences, pitfalls, and successes before settling for an attorney.
The bottom line is that legal practice marketing is becoming more and more sophisticated. You must overcome all these obstacles to attract new lawyer leads and convert them into high-paying clients.
What Do You Need To Do to Be Successful with Generating Lawyer Leads?
Having a constant supply of lawyer leads can be an incredibly strategic and financial advantage to your law firm. However, it takes time and proper planning to execute your strategy and achieve the greatest possible return on investment.
So, what can you do to overcome the challenges mentioned above and be successful with your attorney lead generation strategy? Here are a few tips to get you started.
1. Strive to Understand Your Target Audience
How does your ideal client look like? What qualities must they possess? For instance, if you are a family law attorney specializing in divorce, your ideal client would be someone going through separation or divorce, but they haven’t hired an attorney yet.
Besides profiling your ideal client, you should also know who your competitors are and what they are doing to generate high-quality leads.
Look at the kind of lawyer leads you are currently generating through your marketing effort and ask yourself if they are good enough. Do these leads align with your law firm’s core values, business goals, and practice areas?
If you can address these fundamental issues adequately, then you are on the right track. Typically, this is the first step to overcoming the rest of the digital marketing challenges.
Profiling your ideal clients and analyzing your competitors allows you to differentiate your marketing message and break through the heavy noise online.
2. Differentiate Yourself in the Competitive Market
The truth is that the legal practice marketing space is so competitive that you may lose a lot of money if you are not careful. Sometimes, it can be super hard for attorneys in highly competitive practice areas such as family law to stand out among their competitors.
But if you have identified your ideal customer, you can figure out how to do your targeting to get your message to them.
Strive to build referral networks through professional associations and make sure your law firm’s website communicates the right message to your prospective clients. Ensure everyone who lands on your site can quickly figure out if they are a good fit for your law firm.
Create unique content focused on running your law firm and positioning it as the best. You can also list your legal qualifications on your bio and highlight some of the high-profile cases you have handled that had a positive outcome.
The primary objective is to find your “Blue Ocean” and focus on it. Defining your practice area can also help push through the list of law firms in search engine result pages.
3. Establish a Strong Intake Process for Leads Generated
Nothing matters more than speed in responding to a potential client. This is by far the most essential thing in your entire lead generation process.
Most leads are won and lost by a matter of minutes. The need for speed is primarily driven by the overcrowded market where consumers have a wide range of options at their disposal.
Even more important is the fact that people who want legal help usually get anxious when they are left waiting for too long. Things get even more complicated when they fully understand that they are just one search away from finding another lawyer who can help them with their problem.
So, you need to make sure that your staff can respond swiftly to leads and answer calls that come through immediately. Do everything possible to make the lead intake process consistent.
Today, you can use software to automate and organize many tasks involved in onboarding new clients. Typically, when a potential client senses genuine effort from your team to provide help as fast as possible, it wins them over and helps to build trust.
4. Partner with Attorney Lead Generation Agencies
It is pretty natural to want lawyer leads to function much like an “off-the-shelf” product that either works or doesn’t work. But that is never the case because leads are not binary objects.
In most cases, leads are about communication and knowing how to nurture them from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom when they finally decide to hire you.
In between the process, there is a massive and highly complicated network of ads, online bidding, ever-changing search behavior, and fallible human beings behind the leads.
Therefore, it helps to work with experts who understand what it takes to generate and convert lawyer leads into high-paying clients. With the right partner, you will work closely together to optimize your campaigns and achieve better results.
Your lead generation partner will constantly monitor your campaigns to determine what is working and what isn’t and gather appropriate feedback. They can then use the feedback to track down problems and turn up the heat on the things that are working perfectly.
5. Give It Time
Most importantly, you need to learn how to be patient with your team and marketing strategies. Sometimes, you will require a decent sample set of data to assess whether your attorney lead generation strategies are working or not.
There is no shortcut here because you need to study your target audience and understand their behavior to craft a good message that will resonate with them.
So, don’t be afraid to tweak your campaigns and test out different things. The most important thing is to ensure you monitor every change and gather data that will help you make informed decisions.
PALO Is Your Trusted and Reliable Attorney Lead Generation Partner
At PALO, we specialize in helping attorneys generate high-quality leads that can turn into high-paying clients. We understand how critical trust is to our relationship with any client and always strive to keep our promise to you.
We are one of the oldest pay-per-call companies in the legal marketing space, and we have grown steadily over the past decade by delivering quality results.
So, if you are an attorney looking for a steady supply of lawyer leads, talk to us today to find out if we are a good match.
